John Weisman: Direct Action

12:26P.M. The five men in 4D-627A had more than a hundred years of combined intelligence work under their belts. Among them, there wasn’t a region anywhere on the globe that they weren’t familiar with.

Until Deutch had replaced him with a reports officer, Bronco-for Bronislaw-Panitz had been CIA’s assistant deputy director for operations. Panitz had served in Eastern Europe. He’d been chief in Budapest and Singapore, come back to run Agency operations in Western Europe, then gone out again, this time to Madrid. At fifty-five, Bronco still had the imposing build of an NFL fullback. He worked out in Langley’s gym four days a week, pumping iron and playing the same kind of full-contact, half-court basketball he’d first learned on the streets of Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood as a teenager.

Antony Wyman currently ran CIA’s much-reduced Counterterrorism Center. But the corridor gossip said he was about to be eased out, replaced by someone who’d be more compliant to the new director’s wishes. Wyman was known as “tony Tony” because he was a complete and devoted Anglophile. His MA (history, honors) was from Cambridge. He wore bespoke chalk-striped London-tailored suits, loud Turnbull & Asser shirts, even louder T &A ties, and bench-made brown suede shoes from John Lobb. A gold-rimmed monocle customarily hung on a black silk ribbon around his neck, and a silk foulard square perpetually drooped from his breast pocket.

But Tony Wyman was no more a foppish dandy than the Scarlet Pimpernel. He’d served as chief in London, where he’d helped MI5 and MI6 put a dent in IRA terrorism, and in Rome, where he’d pressed SISMI, the Italian military intelligence service, to dismember the Red Brigades piece by piece. After Rome, tony Tony had been assigned by DCI William Casey to destroy the Abu Nidal Organization. The ANO had just killed five Americans during simultaneous December 27, 1985, attacks on TWA and El Al passengers at international airports in Rome and Vienna, and Casey wanted to put them out of business.

“You do what you have to, Tony,” Casey had bellowed, spewing tuna salad as he spoke. He dropped the half-eaten sandwich onto its plate and slapped his cluttered desk for emphasis. “I want that rotten son of a bitch’s head on a pike right next to our front gate. So don’t you let me down.”

Tony Tony had brushed the director’s food from his strié velvet vest and gone to work. By the middle of 1987, a series of Wyman-devised covert-action programs had turned Abu Nidal into a paranoid psychotic. That November, he machine-gunned a hundred and sixty of his own people. Two weeks later, the terrorist chief ordered a hundred and seventy of ANO’s Libyan-based operatives killed. By the end of the year, he’d tortured and murdered more than four hundred of his closest associates because Wyman’s covert-action program had convinced Abu Nidal they might be leaking information to CIA. By 1988, the ANO ceased to be a serious threat.

Charles Hoskinson, the oldest officer at the meeting, was a lifelong Arabist. Short and round-faced, with longish, wispy white hair and neutral gray eyes set off by old-fashioned tortoiseshell, round-framed spectacles, Hoskinson presented a lot more of Bob Cratchit than he did James Bond. But his string of achievements was nothing short of remarkable.

In 1972, as Damascus chief of station-Hoskinson’s first COS posting-he managed to recruit the brother of the Syrian compromising poses. Henry Kissinger during the 1973 October War. Then he.

As chief in Beirut during the bloody Lebanese Civil War, Hoskinson maintained a clandestine backchannel relationship with the PLO that had included chaperoning Ali Hassan Salameh, Black September’s chief of operations, the architect of the Munich Olympics massacre, and a CIA developmental, on a 1977 honeymoon vacation to Hawaii with his new Lebanese wife, the former Miss Universe Georgina Rizak. Hoskinson even tried to teach Salameh how to scuba dive, but discovered that the man who’d cold-bloodedly ordered the deaths of so many hundreds got claustrophobic and panicked underwater.

In Cairo, where he’d served from 1978 through 1981, Hoskinson was not only responsible for helping to guide Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat through the negotiations that had resulted in the Camp David peace treaty, but he also convinced Sadat that it was in Egypt’s long-term interests to throw the Soviets out-something Sadat did mere weeks before his October 13, 1981, assassination.

Hoskinson, however, had been sidelined. It happened after the thirty-plus-year veteran refused to terminate MJPLUMBER, a Palestinian agent who’d been involved in the 1987 attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to Spain. Sure, PLUMBER had murdered Israelis in the past, and he’d probably do so again if given the chance. But these days he was one of the PA’s highest-ranking West Bank security officials. PLUMBER, however, had always had a weakness, a predilection for little boys. It was a vulnerability that had made him an ideal (and successful) candidate for recruitment by Giles T. PRENDERGAST, one of Hoskinson’s case officers, in the mid-1980s.

Hoskinson was convinced Arafat was going to cheat on Oslo. And PLUMBER, who didn’t like the way Arafat was skimming millions without sharing the loot, would divulge how the chairman planned to do it, since he was now a trusted member of Arafat’s inner circle.

But Deutch’s troika wanted no part of MJPLUMBER. “I get everything I need from the Israelis,” Deutch had reportedly growled. “I don’t want some senator complaining that we hire buggering pedophile assassins as agents.”

Hoskinson wasn’t about to tell the DCI that you don’t hire an agent, you recruit him, because the distinction would have been lost. Despite his entreaties, PLUMBER was cut loose, and CIA was denied its only unilateral access to Arafat’s clique. When Charlie went to CIA’s inspector general and filed a formal protest, Deutch’s people went ballistic. The DCI summoned Hoskinson to his office and flat-out ordered him to retire. When Hoskinson refused, Deutch loosed his attack dogs to hasten the decision.

Ten days ago, Hoskinson had been forced to become a hall walker after Tora-Tora Nora’s deputy had him evicted from his office. Undeterred, he’d set up shop in the cafeteria and used the extension of a friendly Near East division desk officer to receive messages. But one of the troika’s spies had ratted him out.

This very morning, Tenet’s toad of an assistant had appeared in the cafeteria with a note instructing Hoskinson to appear forthwith for a psychological exam. Obviously, since Hoskinson hadn’t obeyed Deutch’s every command, he was mentally unstable. An old friend who had access to Deutch’s office suite warned Charlie the DCI was going to terminate him with cause.

Hoskinson had spent thirty-four years and three months at CIA. He loved the place and what it stood for, and he was damned if he was going to let Deutch and his people destroy it. Stan Turner, Bobby Gates, and Bill Webster had been bad enough. But Deutch, Jeezus H. Keerist . Hoskinson looked at Tony Wyman. “Goddamnit, Tony-it’s time to get off our asses.”